First, seriously: Fuck you, depression.

To think what else Wallace might’ve written had he stuck around is to court despair. I read and loved Infinite Jest a few years ago, but have kind of stayed away from the rest of his pile in an only half-conscious desire to ration what little material Wallace left behind. That’s probably a mistake.

In this book of essays, he’s at the top of his game. It’s like watching Jordan play basketball: nobody else was even engaged in the same activity. He’s just that good. The topics vary wildly:

• there’s a personal memoir of tennis and weather;
• a discussion of the relationship between television, irony, and (then-) modern fiction in America;
• a screamingly funny travel piece about visiting the Illinois state fair;
• a fascinating discussion of poststructuralism and the so-called “death of the author” in literary theory;
• one of the best “behind the scenes” film articles I’ve ever read, about David Lynch shooting Lost Highway;
• a lengthy discussion of the realities of professional tennis as they relate to then-rising pro Michael Joyce; and, finally,
• the eponymous piece about “managed fun” aboard a 7-day luxury Caribbean cruise.

It was, predictably, the final essay that pushed me to read this book now; “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” would be great even with no personal experience, but reading it after having done such a cruise makes it even more clear how perfectly right all his observations were.

This guy really had no peers at all. Even if some of the topics above strike you as banal, or as overly academic — the poststructuralism bit ran in the Harvard Review initially; it’s deep water — I assure you they’re captivating when Wallace gets ahold of them. Reading him is an exercise, for me at least, of muttering “Holy Shit!” every few minutes at yet another brilliant turn of phrase or previously unconsidered insight. The words are delicious, and the essays just get better upon reflection or rereading. This is what great writing looks like.

I feel like it’s kind of unfair to do this, but this is that rare book where a pithy summary isn’t unfair: this is a GenX treatment of superheroes in print, told from a variety of points of view. If that idea appeals, you’d love this book. If not, well, keep walking, because it’s not for you.

You’ve got your soon-to-escape superpowered madman, you’ve got your reconstituted super-team, and you’ve got your mysteriously missing and presumed dead Superman analogue. The ingredients aren’t what makes this inventive; it’s the storytelling that I enjoyed the most.

Plus, there’s a bit more going on here than just that — it’s definitely self-aware, which adds to the fun. Grossman slyly references other books, both in genre (the hat tips to Watchmen are frequent, plus it’s impossible to write about costumed heroes without references to comic antecedents) and out (there are nods to his twin brother Lev‘s well-received novel The Magicians).

It’s a well-crafted little book, and one I found FAR more interesting than I expected. I’m definitely on board for his next book, which is said to draw more on his “day job”: Grossman is a video game designer by trade, and has some seriously solid — even classic — titles on his C.V., including System Shock, Deus Ex, and the last big game played here at Heathen HQ, Dishonored.

I debated whether to include this one, as it’s a slim little tome, but it’s still worth commenting on. The book takes the form of several short articles covering the cycling — what, in the author’s view, is important and what’s not. The central message is in the title: Just ride a bike. No argument there.

Petersen is seen by some as (somewhat) responsible for the return of well-made steel bicycles, among other things. After a career with the Japanese firm Bridgestone (though you probably know them better from tires, they made excellent bikes, too), he struck out on his own with the generally well-regarded Rivendell Bicycle Works, which has been quite successful. A glance at his bike prices may give you a hint why; they’re all very, very expensive. I’m sure they’re very nice, too, but I’ve only ever seen one in the “wild”.

Petersen’s list of things worth ignoring when it comes to biking is long and very idiosyncratic. One review referred to him as biking’s philosopher crank, and that’s pretty fair. Petersen is down on helmets, on clip-in pedals, on athletic/technical clothing (which only means he’s never ridden in the South), on riding predictably, on good cadence, etc., etc., etc. All this rises from something I call the unearned certainty of the autodidact — a weird sort of know-it-all position taken by someone who mistakes their own experience for universal truth, especially when that experience is coupled with a personality that makes one certain of one’s own brilliance. Petersen allows this to color his reasoning and make assertions that are at best tenuously supported by cherry-picked facts.

But that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong. And in fact I hope at least some of the time he’s saying crazy crap to provoke discussion and not because he believes it wholeheartedly.

One area where Petersen and I completely agree is his recognition that race culture has damaged regular-joe biking. Twenty or thirty years ago, racing bikes were absolutely better in all ways than the bikes ridden by normal humans, but somewhere along the line specialization pushed those bikes into completely unsustainable places. As a result, the bikes that the Armstrongs of the world ride are nervous, twitchy, and fragile creatures that withstand the punishing conditions of a multiday race more or less ONLY because the teams have mechanics and spares on hand. They’re all made of carbon fiber, too, which has a pretty dreadful failure mode when compared to metal frames.

But walk into any bike shop, and 99% of what’s for sale that isn’t a low-end comfort bike is basically a racing bike, made of aluminum at the low end (which has a TERRIBLE ride) and carbon from $1800-2000 on up. Carbon’s more comfy, but see above re: failure modes. These bikes typically have no attachment points for everyday niceties like racks, either — it’s all weight-weenies all the time, which is sort of like a car dealership only carrying 2 seaters. Most people who walk into a bike shop don’t want or need a race bike; they are Unracers, as Petersen calls them. But there’s very little above the entry level for these folks in most shops. That’s a problem.

When I was shopping for my bike, I found literally nothing I wanted from either of the “big two” (Specialized and Trek), since even if they MAKE non-racer bikes that aren’t giant heavy comfort bikes, they don’t get stocked because they don’t sell as well. And they don’t sell as well because they’re not stocked. That’s bad. All you see are flat-bar hybrids and racers, so even if the shop can order something else for you, you may not even know something else is an option.

Rivendell makes steel bikes intended for broad use and customization, and they sell well. As I mentioned above, some say Petersen’s success is what made it possible for companies like Surly and Soma and others to make a living selling comfortable steel frames as well, and at a fraction of the cost of Petersen’s no-doubt awesome bikes. If true — and I can see how it might be — that’s an unalloyed good (no pun intended). Just like Petersen’s frames, my Surly has plenty of mount points; the frame could support a variety of build-outs, from true cyclocross to commuting to touring to whatever you want to do. No race bike from Specialized or Trek can say the same thing.

Anyway, this is running long. If you like biking, you should probably consider reading Just Ride, even if you’re sure you won’t agree with Petersen’s more outré pronouncements. His central message, which can get lost in his crankiness, is that biking is fun and you should do more of it, and not worry about the clothes or getting fast or any of the ancillary stuff.

In that, he and I agree completely.

OH MY GOD this book may be one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Lawson, net-famous as The Bloggess, has had the sort of life that begs for a memoir, due largely to her truly bizarre upbringing in rural west Texas. (To say more about it would be to rob her book of impact, but it’s literally all I can do to not quote her at length about, say, the 11 ways her childhood was different than yours (raccoons!), or the story of the most freaktastic puppet ever, or her issues with rural wildlife, or the tale of the scorpions, or any of a hundred other bits that left me in tears with laughter.

I’m currently only reading my 15th book of the year (these little blurbs lag), but it’s a cinch Lawson’s screamingly funny memoir will be near the top of my year-end list. She’s astoundingly gifted as a humorist and writer, and her voice stays hers even when she’s recounting painful or scary episodes (Lawson battles arthritis as well as an anxiety disorder).

Every single one of you should read this book RIGHT NOW. Seriously.

I picked this book up from IO9 at some point, and it’s been languishing on my Kindle forEVER, so I thought I’d finally give it a go. I was hoping, based on press, for sort of a speculative/alt history police procedural a la Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which I found utterly delightful.

Sadly, I was to be very disappointed. Empire State is Christopher‘s first novel, and it shows. It’s all over the place, with elements of noir, steampunk, alt history, mystery, superheroes, and more, and none of it ever quite gels into a coherent story.

I can’t say as I recommend this. Amazon’s reviews seem to bear this out, though that’s a notoriously fickle metric. The narrative just doesn’t hold up, and the characters are kind of flimsy and interchangeable (and not just in the way allowed for in the book’s universe). Christopher’s attempt at worldbuilding here is, well, a good attempt, but it doesn’t really work. The kitchen-sink approach to plotting — masked heroes! war! airships! robots! alternative universes! detectives! conspiracies! — rarely flies well, and this is no exception.